Bug squashing at ZuriHac2014

Joachim (nomeata) wants to run a small bugsquashing sprint at ​ZuriHac 2014.

Requirements

You should bring some Haskell experience and be confident reading other people’s Haskell code. You do not need to know all the latest fancy type hackery – GHC itself is written in quite plain Haskell. Some knowledge of git is also useful.

Obviously, you need a machine to work on. The more core it has, the less you’ll have to wait.

Setup

Your changes need to be validated. So make sure you validated GHC once. I suggest to have a second working copy of GHC that you only use to validate. There is a section explaining how to do this.

Fork ​ghc on github (or otherwise publish a fork of the GHC repo) for easier collaboration during the hackathon.

Optional tips

If you have a strong remote machine with lots of cores, you can have the validate tree remotely.

For more convenient validation, especially if the validate repository is remotely, I (Joachim) have a script ci-validate.sh that waits for a new branch calls validate/foo, then validates it cleanly and either moves it to validated/foo or broken/foo. If you want to set up that as well, fetch the script from my ​ghc-devscripts repository.

Possible tickets

This is a list of tickets that might be suitable for a hacking sprint, but feel free to look for others (click “All Bugs“ and “All Tasks” on the left). And of course, feel free to extend this list.